Friday, September 08, 2006

Well, the day is finally here – my first trip to India starts today and I am excited. I am sitting here in the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) in the Tom Bradley International terminal in the Lufthansa Business class lounge – relaxing, and preparing for the trip. (It was actually much easier to get through check-in and security in the International Terminal. About a total of 25 minutes from the time the shuttle dropped me off until I was in the lounge, checked in.) Relaxing is definitely a requirement before boarding the plane to first stop in Frankfurt – where I will meet up with others joining on the trip – and then finally making the other leg to Bombay, India (Mumbai). My preference was to go this route over the Pan-Asia route because the timing of the flights makes the jet lag easier to handle for me.

It is funny to think that almost exactly one week from now I will be landing back here in Los Angeles. That makes for a really quick trip, especially since we are starting in Bombay (Mumbai), on to Poona (Pune), and ending up in the suburb of New Dehli called Noida. We arrive in Bombay at approximately 1:00am India time early Sunday morning.

I am excited about the people and culture that I am about to meet face-to-face. This is an area of the world that I have not yet had the opportunity to visit and I admit I have some pre-conceived notions on what I have heard about it in the past. Apparently, the majority of my friends who have already visited India either really love the country India or absolutely hate it. I am interested to see what I will feel, although I am expecting to really enjoy it based on my previous travel experiences. What I am expecting to see is a lot of poverty, a lot of crowds, and really bad traffic. Those seem to be the common themes that have been communicated to me thus far, I wonder how they will hold true.

This is a business trip, of course – and while I am sure I will enjoy the experience and the new cultural experience; I do have some work to do. So, after I finish this quick post – I need to spend some additional time reading the proposals of the vendors that we are visiting. However, since work is work – I will not be discussing the business aspects of the trip in any detail, even though that will constitute a the majority of the trip.